Soul Searching at Oregon

By BILLY WITZ

Published: May 1, 2010

CORRECTION APPENDED

EUGENE, Ore. -- As the Oregon football team scrimmaged on a recent morning under overcast skies at Autzen Stadium, Jeremiah Masoli stood on the sidelines, his hands tucked inside the pouch on the front of his practice jersey and his helmet deposited under the bench behind him.

For more than 90 minutes, Masoli did not take any snaps at quarterback, did not fill in at receiver as he has done at some spring practices, did not do anything more taxing than try to stifle a yawn.

Masoli, the deft operator of one of college football's most innovative offenses last fall, when he led Oregon to the Rose Bowl, was to have been a Heisman Trophy contender for a team that was expected to be in the hunt for a national title. Perhaps, as it did for Joey Harrington nearly a decade ago, Oregon would have plastered a billboard of Masoli on a Manhattan building.

Instead, he is the face of Oregon athletics for a different reason: a program run amok.

Masoli has been suspended for the coming season after pleading guilty in March to a felony burglary charge for stealing a laptop from a fraternity house. He is one of six players who were arrested during a span of several weeks.

The problems at Oregon, which completes its spring practice Saturday with its annual spring game, have not been confined to the police blotter. The state attorney general launched an investigation into the $2.3 million buyout of Athletic Director Mike Bellotti, the former football coach whose ''contract'' turned out to be a handshake agreement. Though no wrongdoing was found, the attorney general, John Kroger, said the arrangement exposed the university to financial risk by not following procedures.

The hiring of a basketball coach was no more smooth. By the time Dana Altman was hired last Sunday, after fruitless overtures to Tom Izzo, Brad Stevens, Jamie Dixon and Mike Anderson, among others, the job search had taken six weeks, or long enough that three players had asked for their releases.

Now, Oregon must find an athletic director -- one who will have to figure out how to make the bond payments on the new $227 million basketball arena that will open next season, among other things.

''It's time for the athletic department to do a little soul searching on how they can serve the university,'' said Nathan Tublitz, a biology professor and the president of the university senate. ''The athletic department is out of control here.''

The tension between athletics and academics has been longstanding at Oregon, since the university in the mid-1990s -- with the backing of the donor Phil Knight, the Nike co-founder -- began pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its athletic facilities, which are among the most opulent in the country. Before Bellotti, the department had been run by its No. 2 benefactor, the booster turned athletic director Pat Kilkenny.

Football players, who a generation ago hung their backpacks on nails, now walk into a two-story, wood-paneled locker room with 60-inch flat-screen televisions and Internet ports at every locker. A new learning center -- dubbed the Jock Box for its glass cube design -- has been built primarily for athletes.

If athletes at Oregon want a top-of-the-line laptop, they only need to request one and pay $100 a year to insure it -- Knight donated 550 specially engraved Apple notebooks for their use.

That twist, in the wake of Masoli's arrest, has not been lost on many around campus. When guard Mark Asper, a sociology and Spanish major, has pulled his laptop out in class, he has had classmates admire it and then ask the inevitable question.

''Is that one Jeremiah could have gotten?'' Asper said. ''And I say, yes. They want to know: What was he thinking? I just have to humbly apologize. People say, 'Oh, you guys are a bunch of hooligans,' and it's tough because you don't have any evidence to the contrary.''

A case in point came in late February. Coach Chip Kelly called a team meeting after several arrests. He outlined the standards he expected his players to adhere to and then affirmed at a news conference that he had not lost control of the program. Less than 24 hours later, linebacker Kiko Alonso was arrested for driving under the influence. The next day, receiver Jamere Holland, believing Alonso had been kicked off the team, unleashed an expletive-laced rant against Kelly on his Facebook page.

Kelly has dismissed three players, including Holland, and suspended two others -- Masoli and Alonso -- for the season. LaMichael James, the team's best running back, and kicker Rob Beard were each suspended for one game, possibly more, after pleading guilty to physical harassment in separate cases involving women.

So, rather than distancing themselves from the behavior of LeGarrette Blount, whose nationally televised sucker punch of a Boise State player was one of college football's enduring images last season, the Ducks demonstrated in the early days of the off-season that birds of a feather do indeed flock together.

Kelly, who was promoted from offensive coordinator to head coach in 2009 when Bellotti was made athletic director, said he did not believe his message was getting lost. He pointed to the fact that there were no off-the-field incidents in his first nine months on the job.

''You have to understand -- kids are 18 to 22 years old,'' Kelly said. ''They're going to make mistakes and when they do, there will be punishment.''

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An article on May 1 about the tension between academic goals and the scandal-plagued athletics department at the University of Oregon, which has some of the most opulent athletic facilities in the country, referred imprecisely to a learning center and a laptop program there. While primarily for athletes, the center, which is often called the Jock Box for its design, contains areas that are open to the public or used by others on campus; it is not ''for athletes only.'' And if athletes at Oregon want one of the 550 laptops donated by Phil Knight, a Nike founder, for their use, they need to request one and pay $100 a year to insure it; it is not the case that ''all they have to do is ask'' for one.